Language

Grammar

Does the bell toll for "whom"?

GEOFF PULLUM once thought he saw the death of "whom" coming in this embarrassing mistake where "whom" is trotted out in a place it obviously doesn't belong. I'd say it's more likely to be seen in its opposite: a carefully copy-edited ad (click to enlarge) for a fancy service in a glossy magazine, saying "If now is the time to consider a move, we know who you should be talking to." The advertiser is the McKinley Group, a legal headhunting group, and the ad appears in the American Lawyer, an expensive glossy monthly. The model in the ad is as high-end handsome as Clooney on a good day, wearing a watch that probably costs more than my home, looking out the window and wondering if $300,000 is too meagre a pay rise to justify the annoyance of changing firms. And there he is, being appealed to with not one but two usages decried by strict grammarians. "Who" should be "whom" here, and that whole clause would traditionally be rendered "to whom you should be talking".

The sentence-ending preposition rule is an invented bit of silliness rightly ignored by many excellent publications. But "whom" is still standard in formal writing. Ads aren't usually terribly formal, of course, but this one is for quite a ritzy service, which is why it struck me. If an ad like this found both "to whom you should be talking" and "whom you should be talking to" too stuffy, and couldn't be bothered to re-word to avoid the problem, then "whom" may be in real retreat.

Whom is dead. I was never taught the distinction in school. I decided to learn it, and it was a neat trick for a few weeks. Then I stopped and went back to using who because sounding like a pretentious jackass is only amusing for so long. Anyways, I think the fact that English has few case rules is a boon. I am not going to promote complexity, when simplicity (in this particular situation) is one of English's finest virtues. Get rid of the rest of them too for all I care. They/them, he/him. It will sound irritating to a generation, but its to the languages advantage from my perspective.

Outside of fixed phrases, "whom" is only required in English as the object of a preposition, when it follows that preposition; and since it is normally fronted like all interrogative/relative pronouns, there's really no use for it any more.

"Whom" is, if not dead, at least on massive and expensive life-support. The ad is correct in using "who" as a fronted relative pronoun and Johnson is surprisingly wrong in purporting to be surprised that it does. Johnson has confused grammar with class (a speciality of English journalism), and appears to believe "whom" is U. It's not. It's the non-U folks whom think that "whom" adds a certain lustre to one's writing, as Geoff's photo shows.

‘Whom’ is derived from Old English ‘hwæm’, the dative case of ‘hwa’, which meant ‘who?’, ‘anyone’, ‘someone’. The accusative was ‘hwone’. Thus, while ‘whom’ might be appropriate after a preposition, those who argue for the preservation of objective ‘whom’ must ask themselves why they are not arguing for ‘whon’ instead.

I am not as surprised as Johnson appears to be at the construction in the advertisement. ‘If now is the time to consider a move, we know to whom you should be talking’ would have been hopelessly prim in such a context at almost time in the past 50 years.

Ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put, as Winston Churchill supposedly put it when scolded.

However, the proper use of "whom" is not nearly so silly. "Who" vs "whom" is merely a relic of the days when English had declensions like Latin. Its nouns also had gender back then. "Who" is to be used in the subject of a sentence, and "whom" in the predicate. In the advertising copy, diagramming the sentence (remember that grammar-school exercise?) makes it clear that "who" is actually the predicate. The minimal version of the sentence is "We know who", which should clearly be rendered as "We know whom", with "we" as the subject, "know" as the verb, and "whom as the predicate".

The reason people have trouble with this is that native English speakers rarely encounter the concept of declensions for sentence position outside of this one word and the personal pronouns. Virtually all the declensions remaining in English are for plurals. I tend to agree that the "ending with a preposition" rule is silly, but as long as "whom" is still part of the English language, it's not that hard to figure out which form to use. "I" vs "me", "he" vs "him" and "she" vs "her" trip up school children all the time as well, but before long we learn, instinctively if not formally, that the first forms are for the subject and the second for the predicate. "Who" and "whom" are arguably almost personal pronouns, so it's not a surprise that they've retained sentence position declensions.

@s_b: No, it's wrong. There is no dative case in English. The dative and accusative fell together half a millennium ago; "objective" is what the case is called, when it's called anything. And "whom" is an old objective form (like "him", "them", "us", and "me"). The traditional rule is that you're supposed to use "whom" wherever you'd use "me" or one of the other 3; but since relative and interrogative pronouns get moved away from object position to the front of the clause -- even from after prepositions, as here -- it's very rare to find "whom" in an object position, and so it gradually fell out of use, until "who" sounds natural to native speakers everywhere except in a preposition phrase: "To who it may concern" is terrible, but "who he gave it to" is fine. And yes, it's after any preposition, since English doesn't really have cases to distinguish them, like German does.

Can someone straighten out for me what the rule actually is? Thanks to the eccentricities of the Scottish education system in the 90s, I never learned much English grammar but I know a bit of German. So I think of it along German lines: that "whom" is used for the dative only, like "wem", and that we used "who" for the accusative, because as someone said above, the form for the accusative has died out long ago. So, two questions:
- is that right? Is it for the dative only?
- where in English is the dative used? Is it for all prepositions?

I agree that "whom" is used in formal writing, but so is "who", except when both governed by and directly following a preposition (avoidable by postposing the preposition). "Whom" is never required as the direct or indirect object of a verb, even in formal writing.